


Hiraeth

by Anecdoche (psychosomatic86)



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angst, First Kiss, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Aziraphale (Good Omens), metaphors metaphors but not a drop to drink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-19 13:20:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19357834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychosomatic86/pseuds/Anecdoche
Summary: And still, after all if it, there's something missing. Call it want, nostalgia maybe, but naming it won't bring it back, if it ever was there at all. And what of the unnamed. What then, angel.





	Hiraeth

(n.)There is no direct translation. No sage scribe aged enough with his myriad wisdoms and lexicons and considerable philosophies who could hope to unravel the scriptured serpent and seraph. Perhaps were he immortal, maybe then. But then, _they_ are, and they’ve tried. And tried it out. Donned it like a ceremonial shroud in deference to that first virulent virescence. Later, doffed it like the cliche madman’s cleverest quip before he’s blown away in big-screen bullet time. There and that and all the bits in-between that get muddled up in the supposed unanimity -- oh have they _tried_. They’ve spanned those concrete possibilities and been left aching for want just because it’s so much better than here or them, _you and I_ unable to operate in the objective. 

 

They did not start there, is the thing. They cannot end there. Of good and evil, they tripped halfway along Jacob’s rungs to tread treacherously the frangible spaces between. It starts in a garden. It ends there, too. Maybe not so obviously. It’s the implication. There’s a home to be found in yearning, the coddling veneer of nostalgia, facade though it may ultimately be. There’s a searching, too, always listless for a threshold over which they might step and claim the other side for themselves, call it a permanence, perhaps. 

 

There is so much searching. Watch closely that it doesn’t become their haunt.

**______________ **

 

It starts in the deluge of original sin. Where an angel brandishes divine plumage between his Mother and his inevitability. For now, the angel rather considers him a liability. This Crawly. All slunk from scales to a looming silhouette of angles and scarlet, a jaw that thrust-cuts upwards in defiance of the rain as he huddles beneath the proffered wing. But he was an angel once, despite his otherwisely intentions. His own scorched wings reveal the evidence -- another mistranslation -- soaking through to a more appropriate iridescence, echo-green between the feather filaments where the garden languishes behind them. Each of its scholared limbs bow to the rain, a retrospectral cenotaph, monumentally rotten in the mud. They do not see that. They stare ahead to sand where nothing suggests but expects all the same. Where two sinners flee and do not look back for fear of what slouches after. It wouldn’t hold. There’s a lot of that in the coming generations, and some succumb to find salt in the wound of curiosity. It’s a testament to It all. Circumscribed to memory and idealized as doctrine. 

 

Hell, some even say it’s holy.

**______________ **

 

There are purposes to such falsities, after all. Ulteriorities. It’s how those curious humans flesh out progress. Disconcerting, really, when they don’t know what it is they long for yet cling all the same, barnacled in. How they bury it in piety, wear their knees at the altar because they think She prefers them threadbare. Really, they’re better off plummeting.

**______________ **

 

They did. He did. Crawly. Crowley. _Whichever_.

 

_Consorting with the Fallen, what will they think of you? What will they do?_

 

Shockingly, nothing, so long as the work gets done downside. Barely a multitudinous eye flutters when they arrive at an Arrangement, their own little concept of progression. There are regrets. Like when he lost favor with his sword. But grander. The demon matters far more portently than some celestial blade, brings a fire too sharp to ever douse. 

 

He asks for water all the same. Implores it over a century and a half until the midnight lights of Soho saturate the transaction. And how do you come back from that? How did they get this far? Where are the stones of the Eastern Gate to stymie that penetrating stare? To cradle dust and rib and apple? Is it all just left for grave and sweetbriar? 

 

He flees from the Bentley and does not watch its departure, cannot turn around. Offered a means to go, he chooses to remain. Not falling back. Just… stagnating. Dithering, wringing his hands and gnawing his trembling lip into submission. 

 

He found a way to love in the gutted spires of a blitzkrieg chapel. He broached it tonight, tremulous and perfectly within reason of reach, but not the other way round. Now, something wrenches it clean between his sternum. Leaving cascades of sinews. He lets them drip between his fingers and envisions a penance of hellfire.

**______________ **

 

It’s over before it even comes to pass. And when he does face Hell’s ire, well, then it really isn’t even him. Donned and doffed, a sulfur-wrinkle of the nose for Michael, and how about a towel for his troubles? How sweet it was to leave them, then, undrowned. Wholly. And what had they to do with he upstairs? Did Crowley find the fate they’d planned for, _hoped_ for? Blessedly unaware, did they sentence a demon to himself? 

 

There’s poetry in it somewhere, but he can’t pin it down to parse.

**______________ **

 

There’s so much written about it, and all of it authored by the ones who can never depreciate it fully. Sure, they can coin a great satire or two, every century or three. Blake, especially, was onto something with all that clay business, and his clever little copper plates. There’s an angel with originals -- not the plates, of course. Just their consequences. The ones for children, apparently. A simplicity to be scoffed at until he finds an occasion of clarity and could weep for the cruelty of it all. Until It is fleetingly forgotten. Until it’s time to gather life from dust, but you can’t without that glance over the shoulder and a curt nod to the before of it all, right? So he can’t.

**______________ **

 

So, now, the After. The languid wake of catastrophe awash in ripples but hardly a maelstrom anymore to trouble its placidity. And only ever _always_ forward.

 

They talk often in the ease of jest, their laughter trapped in clattering reverb among the bottles that litter his shop every Thursday evening. When he tells about the rubber duck until he can barely remember what one looks like. Crowley grins his glazed eyes and muses on Gabriel’s stupid pathetic face, and really it was too bad you couldn’t’ve seen it, Angel, I mean _really_ a work of art, that. The angel smiles and touches his friend’s hand so it can be pulled away in favor of more immediate ramifications, grabbing-sloshing-praising more wine until the drunkenness sends its rich rivulets down the neck of the bottle, spilling over laciniate wrist and knuckle, a provided pretense to brandish a plume-of-cotton handkerchief and daub the stains of it away. 

 

“Really, my dear, do be more careful.”

 

Lest it wrest them where they mustn't ever stray.

**______________ **

 

A curious thing happens in repose, when the long sought after tranquilities -- those yearned for fantasies of the burdened mind -- are finally grasped and wrung out to dry in an implacable, scorching sunlight. Monotony -- infectious, faultless, smells a bit like unsweetened porridge -- riddles the days with sores, but even then, at least with those there’s a scab to pick and pass the time. Maybe drum up old blood, thick and coagulant, but with _at least_ a sluggish flow, the anxieties of its evident scarlet to quicken the accompanying pulse like a spurred racehorse. There’s not even that. 

 

But what about the books? The tomes brought back from tombstone sentences. Most are a bit naive now, yes, but why not ferret out the whimsy of it, hm? See the stories through Adam’s apple eye. Yes, the books, and he can confide in the old to see where the new might contend. So he piles high his upturned palms with his most cherished manuscripts, caresses the vellum spine along his favorite book of hours, intends just as many -- and even more weeks -- in devotion to his treasures. 

 

And he does. And he does. Sits there like the days of yore, cocoa a-shiver in its porcelain as he pores through page upon page. It’s well on its way to a pair of legs by the time he thinks to consider it. Thursday again, already. It’s been far too long since he’s lost himself like this, not since a packet of prophecies propositioned itself in the backseat and inspired him to similarly neglect his drink. It’s grown arms, now, and crosses them crossly. He chuckles and pilfers another selfish second to reminisce. Funny, though, when he finds he can’t recall a single word he read. He knows them, each text: verbose verbatim. Still knows them. But there’s nothing new this time round, no keen eyed loon that’s yanked his brain aside to offer unplumbed moralities. As though he knows them all, already. Stale and set, to be discarded for the wayside of perfunctory recollections. When it best suits him. Not when he aches for them. 

 

What did Blake say? They search in vain? But, then, he wasn’t speaking for angels, was he. 

**______________ **

 

A holiday, suggests the demon. How very quaint, says the angel.

**______________ **

 

And so, why not a cottage. And so, why not the seaside. And so on and on, racing London away on the accursed M25 to a seaside cottage where all manner of tourist folk like to plague and play the buxom summer. Save it’s late autumn, already, three months past the prime of another beginning and, hunkering down for the necessity of a seasonal culling, the waves sharpen to slate and wrench in cold updrafting gusts the fickle kernels of the black sea wheat in its profusion atop the chalk-drop cliffs. No sunned with smiles here, just a town turning in and a blind eye to the strange pair that make off for seclusion in a precious little tudor but a constitutional stroll from the beach. _The Albatross_ , its called, scrawled in looping, stainless steel cursive on the balcony frame. Some of the letters have begun to peel off, defiant of their nails. The next house over, the one they passed on the way up, boarded with disuse, he thinks perhaps its name is a joke of some sort, of the owners gone away inland to enjoy the winter. _Our Bog_ , that one, and feels unfinished. Such a funny little custom, all around. 

 

“Huge bugger,” he explains to Crowley. He often forgets his friend knows as little of fowl as his own proclivities truly aren’t.

 

“How many ducks big,” Crowley asks, and snaps their luggage unpacked into the house before there’s even cause for a key at the door. 

 

“Oh - oh _much_ bigger,” he says, and throws his arms wide. “Three meter wingspan, some.”

 

“Fuckin’ell,” Crowley whistles. “How’d Noah deal with those?”

 

“I wouldn’t like to wager,” he smiles.

 

“Tch,” grins Crowley. “C’mon then, Angel.”

 

And up the modest stone path he steps, and into the house, and then gives a raucous shout about the backyard garden and what a state it’s been sold in. Something something soil acidity this and that, and how he’ll have to put rye in at this rate. 

 

“It’s criminal, Angel.”

 

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out, dear.” 

 

The angel abandons his admiring post by the wrought iron gate and seeks out the library. He brought some. Not a lot. Not enough. Just a taste to whet the palate. No sense in dragging London where it can’t belong, though perhaps there will be a significance to their return in a few weeks. Or perhaps it’s just another obligation.

 

He transplants the first tome into the small-set bookshelf along the West wall of the front room, and, to the melody of Crowley’s whinging, waits for it to grow.

**______________ **

 

South Downs is unerringly beautiful, even in the pallor of November. Even embittered with gales that clamor the cliffs and sing mournful through the night, shuddering on curls of listless waves dusting up sprays of white foam and anemic gull shrieks, huddling chartreuse in the dead grass rooted against the elements. 

 

“Thou Shalt” hangs over every door of the cottage in quiet, contemplative suggestion, and the wood and smoke -- a little stove to heat the whole of it -- embroiders orange and cinnamon into an evening, invites sharp burnt coffee on a morning. For hours he toils there, over nothing in particular, while Crowley tills the garden ‘till his knuckles crack from cold and he retires to the balmy embrace of the angel’s company. 

 

Sometimes, weather permitting, there are strolls alongside the ocean. Slow-clatter footfalls on the pebble beach, a surreptitious happenstance of glass, beaten smooth along the seafloor and deposited here to be found and carried further on, inside a pocket, maybe dropped in misremembrace among the reeds, or adorned for the mantle in admiration of a relentless beauty. 

 

Crowley is brilliant at spotting the green bits of it. His angel, meanwhile, finds cumulus clouded white, and claims they’re just quartz so tosses them back. Let them tumble around a bit longer, he thinks, and is gladder for the green in Crowley’s fist. It stops him from reaching out. 

**______________ **

 

“I don’t think the peaches are gonna take.”

 

Snow piles in earnest outside, too late for Christmas, but just enough gall for New Year’s, and, though they should have left, should be planning to, Crowley won’t stop talking of summer. 

 

“Peaches…”

 

Crowley sighs and kicks a fuss up into the air with his cracked-cold hands.

 

“Yes! Spent an age germinating them ‘fore we got here.”

 

“I can’t say I noticed.”

 

Crowley scowls, well, puts one on.

 

“F’course you wouldn’t, Angel, only if it’s schnapps and cobbler, hm?”

 

The angel rolls his eyes over the page he’s been reading for a week and a half now, oh but there’s that snakish grin. 

 

“Foul fiend.”

 

And so fondly, too.

**___ **

 

He steals out to the garden, that night, quite the pantomime, really, though he neglects to consider it against the collar of his tartan dressing gown clutched to his ears, hair a-flutter as whiplash flakes upturn it from the roots and tempt his curls skyward. They burn-kiss the tips of his ears, nuzzle his temples, fizzle out on the flush at his cheekbones as he shuffles through the drifts. He’s watched Crowley out here, stalking spindle and threat as he plucks worms for better prospects and kneads the soil between long, deft fingers. The serpent of his element once more. So, well, maybe a little miracle won’t hurt. 

 

He finds them cloistered near the East corner, where a trellis braces steadfast for the promise of a wisteria spring, and he buries his hands beneath the snow until he finds earth. Feels them dormant down down, shivering, down.

 

A wisp of warmth, a reverent murmur. An aching.

 

After, he thaws beside the cinnamon stove, and wonders: will they remember? When it’s time to split the mud and leave their roots for leaves. Furl and free for a drop of sunlight. Is it good to remember? Or is it just inherent. And what of the nurturing? Is there ever enough to warrant it? Even if it may reap nothing altogether?

 

But then if there’s a chance. Of summer peaches wintered in. Angel and demon alike, they may just have it.

**______________ **

 

Only it was meant to sustain them just a few weeks. Just the off season. Increasingly, he’s afraid to wonder if it may not matter so much, the physicality of it all. Traitorously, he’s starting to consider it’s something else altogether. For what of it all if not tangible. Traceable. A misplaced smattering of ink is loathed in its time for spoiling a perfection, but centuries beyond is cherished for its presence of what was. No one scolds the medieval monks for their scribblings, and many a Bible is sought after for its misprints. For, simply, it proves, and little else is quite so coveted. 

 

As the days lengthen, though, and the sun looms longer, lingers, lazes in the vermillion succulence of its own sets, there is less opportunity for such precision and the subsequent spoiling. Hours yawn and welcome all manner of mistaken reminiscence until it can’t be distinguished, quite insinuating itself in the narrative as an intention all along. It’s a fearsome, disquieting clarity to lack anymore. He lives his springsome days in fits of anxious and melancholy. Of course, he does not let it show.

 

Crowley, for his part, keeps at his garden, blasphemes heartily when the peaches shiver upward, smiles for hours. The angel laughs through it, and clutches his chest in secret where the promised trees take seed in the topsoil of the his aching all over again. He’d half forgotten them, and who could fault that. It’s May, already, by definition a month of indecision with a soggy February and biting March-April behind it. No ledger for them. Yet so much ink and ichor spills over. A thaw to imperil the floodgates. 

 

There’s much talk of London, that old expectation, what they’ll find there when they return. He keeps using that word, while Crowley skirts around it, and doubt lurks in the last embers of the stove. Too warm for it, anymore. Summer encroaches, and he doubts it all so very, desperately much, cannot fathom that there might be peaches, can’t bear to look at the mosaic of seaglass - spoiling white amidst the lush of greens because Crowley won’t let him throw it back, anymore. He’s caught on. Wiley watchful serpent that he is. Coiled up round his heart now, he’ll squeeze what life of him’s left if he’s not careful. 

  **______________ **

 

Summer, now, and three years too early are the peaches. Crowley missed a patch of wine berries, and their thorns sprawl and bind up the trees trunks, tamed to no avail, but unspoiled are the plump hanging gems, as sweet as the divinity that bore them through winter and the coy, wistful sighs that just shy of saying aloud, “ _I know what you did, Angel_.”

 

Foolish to think he could hide from it, from Crowley.

 

Summer, now, and the town bustles not unlike London, with children a-shriek at all hours, some bold enough to sneak up to the cottage and try at glimpsing the odd pair that’s insinuated themselves. Wintered in. And somehow blossoming. 

 

Summer, now, but the winter is not forgotten, not neglected. It offers a point of comparison. He allows it to. Look, my dear, that jetty wasn’t there before, and so they soak into tidal pools and pluck up the abandoned homes of crustaceans. Oh careful, not too close to the edge, atop the cliffs awash in yellow gorse and the returned, green wheat. Remember remember but rage on, to the subtleties of each other, the new growth, tender and vulnerable and ripened on sun-sutured branches, the errant lashing of winter squall in the bark, but there’s a story etched, too. And so much fruit.

 

Summer, summer, warmth and brackish wind and thunder afternoons into humid evenings for Crowley to uncurl into and drowsy out to midnight with him, wine or gin and, yes, the promised schnapps with a sparkling remembrance in those ochre eyes. 

 

Timorous, he accepts its suffusions, lets it sink skin deep at first, and then saturation again, but not for the lights of Soho or the strident admonishments in the too crowded-close passenger seat beside his eventuality. He chooses this. He welcomes it. Please, he invites, hang a hat at the door -- thou shalt, after all -- and marvels that the door is his, also. Their’s. Rough hewn with splinters, desperately in need of a good varnish, and, maybe, come next summer, the scaffolding will be set and they can start on the foundation.

 

He marvels at that, too.

**______________ **

 

Fall, again, and no intention to stray. The peaches are eaten, their leaves curled to mauve and velvet brown. The days deign not to linger so long anymore, and clove takes up its scent beside the stove. But no heart’s delights to hide, this time, as the world strips itself barren for sleep. He’s worn his sleeve to similar tatters, but it’s not so forced, demanded from the pulpit of his conscience or exposing him to vicious elements. It’s evidence of a laboured love, something not to discard for another ream of silk, but something to darn, find the effort of. Snagged on the door frame and sewn into the wood. Maybe cherry smiles or oak conversations. The ever reliable pine of their yearning. Oh, there’s just so much to choose from, isn’t there.

**___ **

 

For his part, Crowley chooses still the garden; up until the last biting frost, he’s determined to see it through. Enamored of his friend, the angel watches, helps, here and there, to braid back a spray of daffodil greens, to bless in a cherry sapling and heal kisses over the sacrament burns it stamps on Crowley’s fingertips.

 

“Sorry, my dear.”

 

“S’okay.”

 

“Just those peaches _were_ so lovely.”

 

A smile uncoils to bask in his radiance, a fond roll of the eyes.

 

“Yeah yeah, shaddup, Angel.”

**___ **

 

Fall, still, a latent harvest spilling over from August into October, burgeoning scarlet-saffron horizons through ivory billows of cloud and sun and the errant, wistful rain. But one last hurrah. A flourish of Indian summer. Might it have been predicted were either less careful of the garden and the killing frost that furtively circumvented its imbued borders. Too well it was tended, though, and so it sighs, unscathed, at the tendrils of sun that unfurl to court a demure breeze, and studiously traipse down, brushing earth and skin, scorched and sacred alike, a demon implacable in his fruitious labour, his angel new to it, but hopeful. Wary, but knowing he is welcomed. 

 

There, now then, his foe outstretched beneath the barren branches of the peach tree as he leans himself over the gate. It’s gone a bit to rust, a bit of the house, too, the last stainless steel ‘ _S_ ’ clinging by an oxidized thread neither of them cares to tack. Open wounds to heal over another winter. He coaxes the gate on its hinges, winces at its squeal, and receives a laugh from under the tree.

 

He joins it.

 

“Never been good at sneaking, Angel.”

 

“From your snake’s view of things, maybe.”

 

Crowley opens his eyes at Aziraphale’s approach, rolls on his side as the angel sits beside him. Props himself on an elbow. Admiring.

 

“Maybe,” he says, and reaches over for Aziraphale’s hand. 

 

The angel gives it.

 

“I was thinking,” Crowley says, the pad of his thumb contemplating the spaces between Aziraphale’s fingers. “If we’re going to be here another season and all...”

 

“Yes, dear?”

 

“Well, just,” Crowley pauses, eyes distant. A frown suggests itself at the corners of his mouth, and that just won’t do. Careful, quick, Aziraphale brushes his thumb to Crowley’s lower lip, just enough to tickle, smiles at the sigh it receives, swallows his own -- heart aflutter -- when the demon emerges from his stupor to press a fiery kiss to the inside of his wrist. 

 

“Wouldn’t you want your books, you know?” He says, stares imploringly up at his angel. “Been a year now, you’ve read everything you brought twice.”

 

“Thrice,” manages the angel, and Crowley huffs.

 

“My point exactly,” he relinquishes Aziraphale’s hand and turns onto his back again, stares between the branches as if the answer might be perched there. “Aren’t you bored, Angel?”

 

He throws his hands up, grasping at emphasis that falls flat, for it’s less of a clatter of fingers and gesticulation and more a flock of something small and precious taking precocious flight. Like robins, a mere fraction of the usual mallard. They settle back down in an instant, folded across his stomach, rising-falling with the great breath he exhales.

 

“Oh, my dear,” Aziraphale hums, and wonders if there’s such a way to articulate any of it. For how to convey to the very being that is, itself, the comfort he so cherishes its own, innate virtue. How to define the inexplicable. How to explicate the esoteric. He could wax such ponderings forever, use up every iteration of every word and still be no closer to its pronunciation, to a truth even fragmentally as sincere, or honest, or helplessly perfect as a garden by the sea and the demon with whom he shares it all.

 

Blessedly, then, he simply decides not to, but Crowley still waits, ever patient, ever braced for disappointment. He’s known so much of that, hasn’t he. He lacks doubt in his love, and this has cursed him millennia over. Condemned to wait, to search. He does so now, with his eyes, flittering, saddened at the corners, the brows, the angle sharp of him softening in anticipation of disappointment. Aziraphale will not give it to him. Not this time. Not anymore.

 

“Too many worries,” the angel says instead, admonishing the consternation from Crowley’s visage with a soft press of a palm to his cheek. “Just… let’s be here for now, my love. Is that alright?”

 

“Yeah,” Crowley breathes, swallows. Then, with more certainty, as Aziraphale coaxes his chin upwards, a coy angle, perfect for fitting things together, “Yes.”

 

They share a sigh, lips tremorous against each other’s, blooming from sad to smile and always only ever searching searching _searching_ it all out.

 

Grafted is the kiss. A confluence. A meeting of such familiar love to make whole two foreign entities, blight to bark for a hope of healing, and Aziraphale surges through the storm of it, caresses his friend’s face, his body flush and warm and alive and _here_ , laughs and moans till neither is distinguishable anymore between either of them.

 

There’s poetry in it. A word for it, he knows that now. Doesn’t know _what_ it is. Probably never will. You can’t parse the impossible, and Crowley is nothing if not infuriating. But it’s there. Here. In the cottage, in the sea, in the refractions of ecchoing green and white glass, the rusted letters, and the peach and soil of a demon’s pleasure against this own. With it. It’s here, and he doesn’t need to look back for it. It’s _here_.

 

At length, they subside, foreheads leaned together, mouths drawing shallow gasps, unable to cease smiling, turgid with new growth and, well, just a little bit sore. But that’s alright. Sometimes, you just need that.

 

“‘Bout time,” Crowley mutters, and draws him close again, unyielding arms serpentine in strength and gentle as a drop of spilled ink upon vellum.

 

Through the humid haze of it, Aziraphale finds he couldn’t agree more.

**___ **

 

Of course, they must return to London. Not immediately, not now, not in the midst of a sun dappled embrace beneath a late fall. Just… sometime. And then, they can arrive again, as they once did when it was all the more half aimless, wholly wanting, and aching them together. As they always have. As they always will. Now, though, here, perhaps there’s a resolution to be found. Perhaps, in each other at least, there’s a home.

**Author's Note:**

> Referenced Works:  
> The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats  
> To Tirzah, The Garden of Love, A Poison Tree, The Human Abstract, The Ecchoing Green - William Blake  
> Our Bog is Dood - Stevie Smith  
> Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor
> 
> Also I'm sure you picked up on some not-words throughout, but hopefully they all made sense. It boils down to the fact I'm an egotistical prig who likes to think they can re-invent the wheel, but hey, language's gotta come from somewhere, and how dare it not bend to my every lexical whim!
> 
> Lastly, I hope you had taken a second to look up the meaning of hiraeth before pressing on with the story. It's fine if you didn't, but I'd maybe encourage you do so now and have another read. I think the concept of it, nebulous as it is outside the context of native Welsh, honors these characters brilliantly, and of course is a hat tip to Michael Sheen in the most subtly overt way I could think of. Though might have done to change South Downs to Aberystwyth or something. Ah well.


End file.
